Slow-light enhanced frequency combs and dissipative Kerr solitons in silicon coupled-ring microresonators in the telecom band

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coupled-ring silicon microresonator system that leverages slow-light effects to generate frequency combs and dissipative Kerr solitons at telecom wavelengths, enabling low-power, compact devices.

Contribution

It demonstrates a novel coupled-ring design that enhances non-linearity via slow-light, reducing the quality factor requirements for silicon comb devices.

Findings

Frequency combs with threshold power around 10 mW

Small device footprint of 0.1 mm²

Robustness to structural disorder

Abstract

We propose a system of coupled microring resonators for the generation frequency combs and dissipative Kerr solitons in silicon at telecommunication frequencies. By taking advantage of structural slow-light, the effective non-linearity of the material is enhanced, thus relaxing the requirement of ultra-high quality factors that currently poses a major obstacle to the realization of silicon comb devices. We demonstrate a variety of frequency comb solutions characterized by threshold power in the 10-milliwatt range and a small footprint of $0.1$ mm$^2$, and study their robustness to structural disorder. The results open the way to the realization of low-power compact comb devices in silicon at the telecom band.